Thursday, August 18, 2011

5 Steps to Making Market Research Part of Your Product Offering

I recently ran into a terrific article by Christine Brown from Branding Marketing about Marketing your Market Research. Her main observation is that companies cut market research budgets because they see it as a luxury. But if they were able to use that research in a variety of ways -- call it recycling or re-purposing -- they might be able to justify those projects.

Christine's article got me thinking that many businesses see market research as an expense rather than a revenue generator, There is an opportunity to "spin" your research projects or design them in such a way that they provide industry insights and information that your customers may want to gain access to.

If you participate in industrial markets that include highly engineered technical products or instruments, you will find profound gaps in information about what customers value.

Create a separate brand and URL for the information and research service that you will provide -- literally treat it as a separate product line.

Start a subscription section of your web site. You can use Wordpress and their Wishlist membership plugin to create a subscription function that allows you to take payments and distribute information based on membership or subscription level.

Run YOUR research and use some of your data for your own decision making and the other data for re-sale to the industry.

Offer to run surveys for customers or competitors in your industry. This might freak out your management, but it's simply called "contract manufacturing" it happens in manufacturing all the time -- companies who have tools and capabilities built into their infrastructure will make another company's product just to keep the equipment running -- it's selling unused time and space.

Run regular tracking surveys and sell the reports and data. Simply include general market and industry question in your surveys and run them regularly and then sell the results. One area of research that is always difficult to get for specific industrial segments is market share information. By simply asking a few questions, you can generate this valuable data and sell it.

Don't let budget cuts eat away at the information that your company and industry need. Try these ways of engaging your management team in the research and creating products and services around research to get it to pay for itself.